June 2021
This is a long and deep topic, I could write a book about it, I’ll try to keep it short and simple as I can.
You’ll need to do your part, try to think it twice, or just give it 5 minutes before saying it’s nonsense, because it might judge how you think, live or even feel in this world.
Let s start from the beginning, what’s sovereignty? We can summarize it in “the power to take decisions”.
And what’s a tool? A mean or enabler to achieve a particular goal, in our modern world/language, just “products and services”.
The sovereignty of tools will depend on the tool (products and services) itself, how frequently we use it, how much our life depends on it, and also in ourselves, how proficient we are using it.
To better understand this topic, I divided tools in three categories, and have some examples to better explain them.
Type of Tools
Totally sovereign
Products and services you fully understand how they work and why they do it. This could be a device you’ve developed by yourself with a trusted material or any resource you’ve gathered as raw as you can. Like furniture you’ve built with a tree you know. It’s also food you cultivated in your garden or orchard, water you’ve pumped from an area you know, and basically, any source of energy with the absence of middleman.
Partially sovereign
Products and services that you didn’t build or totally developed, but for sure they don’t depend on inputs/outputs from third party sources to fulfill their purpose. A regular home appliance, a vehicle, the place where you live and almost anything that doesn’t need to be connected to any system to achieve its goal. Actually, your car relies on outsourced energy and resources, but in general its going to work or it wont start, it could crash, but it can’t control its destination and kidnap you if you take the wrong gasoline.
Little sovereign
Products and services that require a remote access to fulfill its purpose. A computer/mobile device and their apps that are connected to the web, it could also be chips and antibodies incorporated to our body that might be set up remotely. In summary, it’s almost anything that can be controlled without noticing you.
Given this categorization, we can easily conclude that:
- The more complex, powerful, in many cases useful and frequently used tools, are less sovereign.
- The tools we choose impact in our life, depends directly on how deeply we understand how they work.
- Friends, locals, and brands we know and trust are the reason we preferred them over others for specific jobs, that’s because they follow the sovereignty of tools categorization.
Why I thought and wrote about all this? Because I believe we should start being more aware and judge risks in our daily life based on The Sovereignty of Tools.
Every time we eat, we choose a route, we read the news, we talk to someone… actually, everything we do, we should better know the authority we outsource and the consequences.